


the respite I need is you

by ninemoons42



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Homecoming, Inspired by Real Events, Introspection, Modern Era, Reunion Sex, Sweet/Hot, or at least that was the effect I was going for, specifically by author's experiences, they might be slightly co-dependent they weren't exactly forthcoming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 19:13:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11812440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: She's a struggling freelance writer who ought to be filthy rich, but she doesn't want to piss people off. He runs around the world as a professional troubleshooter, the kind who might be operating somewhat outside the law. They're in love.





	the respite I need is you

The next time she looks up at her computer screen, it’s gone dark so there’s nothing on it for her to read, and for a very very long moment she feels like jumping up from her chair and throwing herself onto the threadbare rug that doesn’t even warm her feet any more even though its warmth was the only reason she’d brought its hideous pink and purple and gold into her flat in the first place, and she feels like screaming hosannas and hallelujahs before cracking up and finally going to sleep for the rest of the year -- 

She does none of those things, exactly none: instead she kicks at the rug and runs a fingertip over the trackpad, and she makes a quick face at the ragged chips of copper polish stubbornly clinging to her nail.

On the screen is still the exact same paragraph that she’d started the night with: the one in which she tries to mash together the opening monologue of _Richard III_ and some already-forgotten blockbuster movie-villain spiel. 

She still knows what the entire article is all about.

What the opening paragraph was going to do, however -- that one’s skipped her memory entirely.

There isn’t any time to go and hunt up that movie villain so she can blister her ears and her brain with a nails-scratching-against-a-blackboard speech, because the article is due in the morning and she’s still only got ninety-five words out of the required three hundred down.

Jyn pushes, and her chair rolls creaking away from the desk, and she curls up into a ball of misery with her forehead on her knees and her arms around her legs, and she has no idea why she signed up for this.

_This_ being the table and the chair, one in many-times-scratched wood and the other in not-quite-new fiberglass and faux leather, and the rug beneath them both. The low-slung bed in the corner: king-sized mattress and sheets she hasn’t changed in seven months. Books and books and books, scattered to the four corners of the room in ungainly wobbling piles, except for the corner nearest her where the books are joined by dust-glazed cables and a small plastic box that winks fitfully, fretfully, line of green lights strobing indecipherable digital Morse code into the shadows of the room. Plastic crates stacked more or less neatly next to the door, several of them closed and one of them open and half-full of laundry. A line of shoes next to the bed. 

This is home, or at least this is the flat that she lives in, and she’s planning to move out in a year or so, although she’s been telling herself the exact same lie for nine years now. 

This is not her permanent address. There is still a home waiting for her, an actual gingerbread-style edifice with peaked roofs and her bedroom in the attic and a kitchen large enough to host a small cocktail party in, not to mention an actual claw-footed tub in the bathroom.

The villain in the movie that she can’t now remember is or was a lawyer, and she’d spit on all lawyers if she could muster up the strength to do so.

Lawyers are standing between her and the house that rightfully belongs to her: the house in which her mother had been born, the house that had belonged to her mother’s family since time out of mind. The house that is currently tied up in litigation. The house that Jyn can’t go home to.

The house that’s not as important as the land it’s been built on: and from all reports, the value of the house is small beans compared to the value of the rock that’s buried beneath it. Not one rock, but more like several veins and nodes and -- however a mineral works. 

Her mother’s house is sitting on top of a deposit of kyber-jadeite, and it seems like the entire world must be jockeying for the right to tear every single bit of that mineral out of the earth.

And she wants -- well, what she wants is immaterial to the lawyers and the people involved in the litigation, mostly because what she wants is exactly the opposite of what everyone else wants. She’d rather the rock stayed in the places where it exists now. She’d rather the rock was left alone, untouched, sleeping beneath the soil. Sure a single specimen of kyber-jadeite would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for anything _less than_ ten grams, and the deposit is supposed to be a little larger than just that, and so: the house and the land on it is worth literally all the riches of the planet, to anyone who knows what kyber-jadeite is and can do.

She wants to have nothing to do with astronomical sums of money. She wants to have nothing to do with quarrying and all those muddy machines associated with mining. She especially wants to have nothing to do with arms dealers and all those people trying to create all those other weapons of destruction.

She wants to go home.

And she can’t, unless she wants to busy herself with meeting lawyers day in and day out.

The house, and the rooms and the memories and the presence of her mother and her mother’s family, might as well be on the other side of the moon from Jyn -- hence this not-quite-permanent address, and hence this wracking of brains to produce content, which will be just enough to pay the bills.

The chime of an incoming direct message makes her blink dully at the computer screen and the pop-up window flashing red in one lower corner: it’s Leia, of course it’s Leia, with her usual kind but no-nonsense reminder that Jyn’s got to give her something before the deadline they’d agreed upon passes.

The pop-up blinks again, but no new messages arrive, and now Jyn’s out of excuses.

Laboriously she rolls her chair back towards the desk. Her hands move sluggishly over the keyboard: a peck here, a short phrase there. What is the connection between making puns and being a villain, or more specifically, is there any way she can connect those things without digging up a dead horse? 

If she doesn’t persist, there won’t be anything to eat for the next couple of nights, so: she jumps to the first conclusion that she can think of and tries to spin some high-grade bullshit. The goal is to make Leia laugh, Jyn thinks, as she looks up a quote from a many-times-derided director. If Leia laughs she’s more likely to run Jyn’s article, and that will be another few hundred dollars in the bank.

It’s easy to not think about kyber-jadeite, because she does it every day.

If she had been any smarter, she thinks, she’d take the suggestion one of her friends had made: accept the biggest possible offer to sell the land on which her mother’s house is still standing, _and_ demand for the house to be carefully taken apart piece by piece for the express purpose of getting reconstructed on some other hillside, or even in some other country. The point is, there’s a way to save the house.

But Jyn doesn’t think about the kyber-jadeite in the foundations of the house as it stands now; instead she thinks about pulling up handfuls of sweet-smelling green grass, thinks about the profusion of strange little plants growing in between the half-tended vegetable beds, thinks about the tiny pink flowers springing up from the creeping tendrils of something that pulled its leaves shut at the gentlest touch. Thinks about sitting next to a pile of merrily burning logs that gave off a faint scent of citrus even as they were consumed. Thinks about the great tree that spread its great leafy branches towards the upper windows of the house, that shed thousands and thousands of tiny white flowers onto the breeze at the beginning of each spring.

She remembers running around outside the house and not really remembering what the insides looked like because she was always playing in the grass, always looking up at the sky with the good dark-gray soil crumbed onto her bare feet and bare hands, and the occasional slimy thrill of uncovering a fat glistening worm of some kind -- 

The worm with its segments finds its way into the last few paragraphs of her draft article and then she’s inching towards the goal, three hundred words and change -- begrudging conclusion and all -- and she gives it a quick read-over just to check that her sentences aren’t tailing off into nonsense, then sends it off.

Leaving her in her dreams of a grassy hillside, here in a small cramped flat, with the scent of paper clinging to her sheets and to her hands.

What to do, what to do, before the inevitability of edits and snide comments -- none for just herself, always for the topics she’s forced to work on, because Leia’s seen much more than Jyn ever has.

Fortunately, Bodhi provides: he’s incredibly active on Facebook and on any given day half the stuff she sees on her feed comes from the pages he follows. A short video of a cloud-puff of a white-furred dog, trying to rock-and-sway its way towards its doting and laughing humans. A recipe for croquembouche, with extra pizzazz provided by a base of fresh blueberries. A long-form story on the hunt for the remains of the famed last Grand Duchesses of the Romanov dynasty -- Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia of song and story and scam. Gordon Ramsey ranting about the different sorts of idiot sandwiches, and a music video mash-up of non-male Star Trek personnel kicking ass and taking names.

Jyn laughs, and makes snide comments, and scrolls mindlessly on and on and then --

Purr, purr, purr. Not a cat -- no pets allowed in the lease for this place, and that’s a pity because Jyn’s tastes run to turtles, or perhaps a shockingly bright handful of freshwater fish -- they wouldn’t have made much of a mess, all things considered.

Not the purring of a cat but the ring tone on her phone, and the one that means an unknown number is calling.

She squints at the phone in its charging cradle, and mutters encouragement to herself: “If you know who it is, you can tell them off for scaring you. If you don’t know who it is, you can tell them to fuck off.”

The only people she can’t tell off in that manner are the scumbag lawyers.

So she hits the Answer and Speaker spots in quick succession.

The sounds of a busy cafe: several levels of rising and falling voices and the reedy thread of a karaoke backing track that no one is singing to. Clink and clash of cutlery and of glass, and the dull roar of some kind of kitchen machinery. 

The craving for a cup of coffee nearly overwhelms her, and her brain throws up the memory of the last time she’d bought herself a cappuccino: frothed milk and a particularly woodsy undertone of fine dark chocolate, and the little accompanying cookie that fell into sweet crumbs onto her tongue.

She’s not entirely sure she stops herself from letting out a little sigh of yearning.

The person who speaks to her, however, seems to understand: “I’m waiting for them to finish making the latte and then I’m coming over. Oh, and sorry -- I wasn’t looking when I pulled a phone out of my pockets. Ir’s me, by the way. This is a burner phone.”

“I didn’t know you were back in town already,” Jyn says, and she hides her smile in the tail of her shirt, though there’s no one here to hide from.

“I didn’t know I’d be coming back so quickly, or I would have said something,” the man on the phone replies. “I would have asked you to come out to dinner.”

“I would have picked you up, or prevailed on Bodhi to pick you up.”

“I needed to take a shower anyway.” Soft aside, and she can only make out half the words. “Throw stuff into the washing machine. But as I was saying. Dinner. I got that noodle thing you like so much. Extra eggs to go on top. Fortunately there were enough dumplings to go around, because I really thought they’d run out before I got to the head of the line.”

“Everything sounds good,” Jyn says. “I’ll be right here when you get in.”

“You’d better.” The connection clicks off.

She makes herself get up from the chair and out of the flat, so she can wash her hair and scrape the grime from the corners of her eyes. So she can change out of the shirt that she’s been wearing for the past few days. 

Back in her flat, she beats the pillows on her bed back into shape and that’s all that she can do for the place, because she doesn’t have several hours to scrub into the nooks and the crannies, or shift the piles of books around into a less-cluttered mess.

Laptop off, smartphone on silent mode, and -- one last thing -- she hits the little white switch next to the bed, and the three long strings of fairy lights in blue and white flicker into slow-blinking life where they dangle over her bed.

Footsteps approaching. A voice humming an almost-familiar song, which grows louder and louder. 

Jyn throws the door open, and takes the packages and the bag hanging from the various parts of Cassian’s body, for the express purpose of launching herself into his arms.

He is warm and he smells like the dust of the road, like smoky embers.

She laughs, a little, when he lifts her off the ground, when he rubs his nose into the skin of her throat. “I’m guessing you missed me,” she teases.

“Just a little.” She steps away and picks up his paper bags, and the cardboard carrier with the three paper cups, and sits down on her threadbare rug. Lets him squeeze in next to her, so she’s practically sitting in his lap, and he’s somehow in hers. There are lingering traces of soap-scent on his cheeks.

“Story first,” Cassian asks, stowing his backpack at the foot of her bed, “or food first?”

“I don’t know, because I don’t know how long you’re going to be here,” she says.

Her reward is a smile. “At least ten days, then they’ll give me my next assignment. So I have a little time.”

“That’s good. Dinner first?”

“Sounds good.”

Dumplings, noodles, and deboned chicken wings stuffed with fried rice and bits of ham, and eggs poached in soy sauce and black tea. Cassian’s chopstick technique has improved from the last time they had this kind of meal. She offers him half her braised beef, and he passes her three extra dumplings. There is even dessert: a soft chewy ball of steamed rice rolled in sesame seeds, in the heart of which is hidden a dollop of sweet red-bean paste.

The coffee blooms into rich fragrant warmth on her tongue. 

Without meaning to race each other to the bottoms of the various cartons and containers, they are soon picking at the remains of the meal: and Jyn sighs, and tucks herself into Cassian’s side, the two of them leaning against her bed. “I was worried about you, you know.”

“I know. And I’m sorry I made you worry, but -- it wasn’t easy to get any word out of that place,” he says. “Not sure I can tell you too much. Let’s just say, we were glad to be carrying some of our extra supplies.”

“That bad?”

“Yeah. I thought we’d have to get smuggled out or something. That I’d have to get home the really long and roundabout way. That would have taken about three weeks.”

“That’s too long,” she says.

“So I’m glad it didn’t have to happen.”

His head on her shoulder, a heavy weight.

She curves her arm around him and draws him close.

“I wish I could write you as the hero of a story,” she whispers, not really thinking about the words coming out of her mouth. “You’d be -- you’d make a good protagonist.”

“I hope not,” he mutters. “You know what it is I do.”

“I know what _troubleshooter_ means,” she says. “I don’t get all the ins and outs and frankly, you’re right, please do not tell me about these things because what I don’t know will keep me safe. But still. I think I can figure some things out for myself, yeah?”

“That’s the thing I don’t understand. You figure things out. It’s kind of what you do. But people don’t want to listen to what you have to say.”

“If I could express myself, like, in court, I wouldn’t be having the problems I’m having now,” she says.

“Point.”

“If I wrote about it, though.”

“If you wrote a novel about it,” Cassian says, after a moment.

“I want you to be in the novel,” she says, fingertips stroking circles into his wrist.

“I can’t be the hero,” he says.

“And you’re never going to be the villain.” She snorts. “I was just wondering why movie villains have to use stupid puns when they’re speechifying, can’t they be more subtle, or more creative at least?”

He laughs, and she treasures that sound, tucks the thought of it warm into a corner of her heart so she can hold on to it. “Most people will say, that will make them root for the _villain_.”

“Implying that the heroes are dumb? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Lots of books and movies don’t make sense.”

“Why is that?” But it’s a rhetorical question, and she doesn’t want to spare the energy to think about an answer.

She kisses him instead, full on the mouth, and he makes a sound that she could almost call grateful.

That first kiss is chaste and soft and lingering -- and then it leads into the next, the next, the next, and when he opens his mouth and coaxes her to do the same, it’s her turn to reach for him, hands alternately greedy and gentle, and she doesn’t know how she lands on her back with the remains of their food only a few inches away, but she’s thoroughly entranced by his hand protecting the back of her head, and his tongue spearing hotly into her mouth.

So she slides her hands up into the back of his shirt, skims over his damp skin, and she feels him shiver and swear softly and press closer -- she’s only too happy to wrap one leg around his waist to make him stay in place -- 

Desperate whisper against her lips -- Cassian murmuring her name like an invocation -- she pushes him in the direction of the bed and dives right in after him so she doesn’t waste any time -- hands moving, his and hers, and she’s squirming out of her clothes and he’s all but tearing his own away, and it’s _relief_ and _need_ washing down her nerves when they’re finally bared to each other, when it’s just them in the sheets and she’s pulling him back on top, arching up over and over for kisses to every part of him she can reach -- his throat his temple his forehead his nose his mouth -- 

She groans, yearning, when he pulls away from their kisses -- only to half-shout his name when he fastens his mouth to the pulse point in her throat and begins to suck, begins to just barely press the edges of his teeth into her skin. If she bruises after this -- she needs to bruise from this -- she’ll have some kind of proof that he’s been here, that she’s spending these breathless moments with the real weight and warmth of him in her arms -- 

Rolling over so she’s on top of him: she maps out the lines of him with her mouth and her hands, scattering sucking kisses down his throat, over his collar bones, over the breadth of his chest and lower -- lower, lower, till she’s setting her teeth in him as he’d done to her, biting gently over the planes of his belly, the groove of his inner thigh -- 

“Jyn,” she hears him say, and she feels the hot red rush in her body, in her mind, and he’s all she can see and feel and know as she blows a soft breath onto the dark wiry curls surrounding the base of his cock. The hard hot length of him, already twitching eagerly in her loose grip -- and the corresponding moan she tears from his throat as she brushes the damp tip against her lips, painting her mouth with his pre-cum before taking him in. 

She can feel the unmistakable runaway pulse of him against her tongue, as she goes down down down on him, until she’s very nearly at the point of choking, at which point she forces herself to take a deep breath so she can move back up.

Up and down. Slow and deep. Dimly she’s aware of Cassian whispering her name in a kind of tortured awe, of his hands tightening into fists where he’s holding them rigidly at his sides -- and that won’t do, she thinks, so she takes his hand and rests it against the back of her neck.

He gets the hint. Holds her, not to control her, but just to have another way to touch her, to hold on to her.

She keeps up her deliberate pace until he snarls out an obscenity, until he growls, “Stop!”

As quickly as she pulls away, he’s on her, and she hitches in an excited breath as he holds her hips down with powerful force, as he presses open-mouthed dirty kisses to her thighs and then, up -- up to her cunt, where she can already feel how wet she is.

“You’re fucking beautiful, you’re so good to me,” she thinks she hears him say -- she only feels the rush of hot air against her, the rumble and the nearness of him, and then she’s spiraling out into shocked pleasure as he goes down on her -- his tongue on her, in her, and the determined pace he sets -- 

“Please please please,” she hears herself chanting, all but mindless -- 

“Yeah,” she hears him say -- and he drives three fingers at once into her dripping cunt and she rides the force of him, writhing madly, until she’s suddenly falling hard over the edge of her climax.

For a long moment she’s thrown free of her mind, and of her thoughts.

And she opens her eyes to the sight of Cassian on his knees above her, lazily pumping his cock -- there’s a purely feral smile on his face, purely satisfied, and she can’t even bring herself to tease -- just forces a harsh breath from her mouth and hisses, “Come on, come on -- ”

“Greedy,” is his reply, as he pulls her into position, one of her legs around his waist and the other braced upwards against his body, so they come together in a fierce easy glide that knocks the breath from her lungs once again -- 

She knows she’s making sounds, she knows she’s calling his name, no way to know if they’re yelling the ceiling down and she’s far far beyond caring: all there is, is the sheer power of every thrust, every roll, the impact of their bodies crashing together, one shock after the other --

“Close, close, _please_ ,” she cries out, fighting to get closer -- 

She hears him shout her name, once, and then he’s spilling into her and all it takes is a few more thrusts before she’s gladly overwhelmed again.

“I don’t even know how you do it,” she says, very softly, once she’s capable of words and sentences once again. “You touch me and it feels like the world becomes a little more real.”

“Say the same for you,” he mutters, mostly into the top of her head. “I mean, I know I exist, I know my mind is sending out thoughts and my body is moving, I know my body and my mind react to the world. And when I’m with you I know all of those things and I can almost anticipate what _you’re_ going to be doing, too.” His chuckle rumbles through her very bones. “Of course I’m almost never right.”

“Except when you are,” she says.

“Not a very common thing, is it?”

“I don’t know, you were pretty good just now,” and she kisses him playfully, between the words, just because she can, and because she likes seeing his slow sweet grin, and the happy lines bracketing his mouth.

“And you were magnificent. I could get lost in you.”

“Why don’t we get lost then?” Forget about litigation and kyber-jadeite and troubleshooting and all those other things for now, is what she means: because he will always be who he is, and she’s working on doing better by herself, and forgetting is difficult, for her reasons, and for his.

“Best idea ever,” Cassian says, and the last thing he does that she knows is kiss her, until they slide gently and naturally into elusive sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Look me up on tumblr at [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com)!


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